Kim Gordon talks breast cancer diagnosis & split with Thurston Moore

In the first revealing interview since Sonic Youth announced their hiatus in 2011, Kim Gordon has spoken about the ending of her marriage with bandmate Thurston Moore which led to the group’s break-up and a battle with breast cancer that followed.

Speaking to Elle, Gordon opened up about the decline of her 27-year love affair with Moore, saying ”It ended in a kind of normal way – midlife crisis, starstruck woman.” In the interview, she declines to name the woman in question but describes her as someone who became “a part of the Sonic Youth world” and later embarked on “a literary project with Moore”.

“We never got to the point where we could just get rid of her so I could decide what I wanted to do,” Gordon explains. “Thurston was carrying on this whole double life with her. He was really like a lost soul.”

Gordon also reveals that, around this time, she was diagnosed with a non-invasive form of breast cancer. “I’m fin ” she tells the publication. “It’s literally the best you can have. I didn’t do radiation or anything, but I was like, ‘Okay, what else is going to happen to me?’”

The singer, who has been performing solo shows and working on a new project with Yoko Ono, seems wholly centred on art at the moment. ”A few years ago I started to feel like I owed it to myself to really focus on doing art,” Gordon concludes. ” have a lot of things going on.”

Gordon plays the Yoko Ono-curated Meltdown festival later this summer.